What happened?
Twelve years!
You hit me with a cricket bat!
Ha! Twelve years!

Saturday, August 05

Life

And I Like It That Way

Up past 3AM repairing a broken Elasticsearch node.

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Tuesday, August 01

Life

Tohru Arrives

Was on a global conference call for work (at least five countries represented) when the knock came at my door.

Which also happened last week when the keyboard and speakers arrived...

Anyway, plugged in, switched on, works.  The included keyboard is meh, but in the US it comes with the much nicer premium keyboard that I already have.

The screen is beautiful, it's whisper quiet, and lightning fast.

/images/Tohru.png?size=720x&q=95
Lookit all them cores!

(Kanna also arrived.  Kanna is my fridge.)

So, first impressions: It's compact - quite a bit smaller than the iMac, though the screen is the same size. Setup was dead simple once I realised the keyboard had a USB widget and wasn't Bluetooth.

The screen is very nice - not quite as colourful as my iMac, and not quite as sharp, but there's not a huge gap, and it was little more than half the price.

It's fast, not astoundingly so, unless you've been using a $200 netbook lately in which case it is pretty astounding; and basically silent under normal load.

I used Cities: Skylines running at 4k resolution as a load test, and it runs very smoothly.  The fan definitely picked up speed as I scrolled around, but it's a fairly pleasant low-pitched sound and not noticeable if you have the game music on.  It spins back down to silent within a few seconds of exiting the game.  My main worry with this system was that it would turn into a hair dryer while gaming, but it seems to cope very well.

The sound from the internal speakers - which can't be more than an inch and a half in diameter - is okay.  I also ordered a set of external speakers because I was expecting the sound to be only okay, and the speakers are...  Fine.  Not remotely audiophile, but fine.  I wouldn't recommend buying them unless they came in a package deal from Dell.  Though there seems to be some audio processing going on, and they sounded substantially better when I switched the external speaker type in the menu, so maybe there's room for improvement.

What I wanted was a fast Windows machine for software development and occasional gaming that wouldn't take up much space and could be set up in ten minutes.

What I got was exactly that.  And a fridge.

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